Immortal memory

It was always going to be hard to avoid controversy when the time came to mark this 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism. And President George Bush struck a very contemporary note over the weekend even as he paid tribute to the historic sacrifice of the brave Allied soldiers who secured final victory.

True, liberation for western Europe meant the imposition of Soviet rule in the east - hence the current row between the Baltic states and Russia. But was the US really guilty of appeasement in the Yalta carve-up (and the long nuclear standoff of the cold war) as Mr Bush implied? The president was talking about Berlin 1945, but his subtext was Baghdad 2003. Yet there is no epic grand alliance onslaught that will topple today's tyrants in the manner of 1945.

It would be good to hear from Vladimir Putin, hosting today's VE Day ceremony in Red Square, even some half-admission that the 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler was at least regrettable. But that is sadly unlikely. For in Moscow, as elsewhere, remembering the war is still a national experience of finest hours and last hurrahs, with poppy wreaths at the Cenotaph, Churchill's low growl and Vera Lynn singing for Britain. France's celebrations saw a march down the Champs Elysées and homage to General de Gaulle. Germany, poignantly, held a festival of democracy at the Brandenburg Gate, where the new Holocaust memorial is to be opened this week amid intensifying re-examination of wartime guilt and victimhood. The bitter dispute between China and Japan over Japanese history textbooks is a reminder that this war still needs to be understood and remembered, above national prejudices, on the European and global level.

A war that engulfed 60 countries and cost 55 million dead, including 27 million Russians and 6 million Jews, is too vast an event to encapsulate, except to recall that it set new standards for barbarity in the heartlands of the European enlightenment. It remains the war that shaped our lives, including those who were born long after it ended. We are all, to some degree, victims of Nazism and its legacy.